The Last Days of Maiju Lassila

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Who wrote this novel?

J I Vatanen was not a real person; he was a heteronym-a characterized pseudonym-of a strange Finnish author named Algot Untola, who was arrested as a Red agitator at the end of the Finnish Civil War in May, 1918, and summarily sentenced and shot.

This novel is J I Vatanen’s
memoir of the events leading up to that violent death and its tragicomic aftermath.

But who wrote it?

Douglas Robinson, a noted Finnish-English translator and translation scholar, claims that he pseudotranslated it-but what does that mean? A pseudotranslation is a hoax translation, one with no original. But if the hoaxer declares the hoax up front, is it still a hoax?

The Last Days of Maiju Lassila is a readable story with its backdrop in a volatile political history from the 1880s to 1919; but it is also an experimental memoir/novel/translation that toys with our certainty about reality.